AlterNet.org: Willa Paskinhttps://www.alternet.org/authors/willa-paskin
enNetflix's Hilarious, Addictive New Series about Life at a Low-Security Women’s Prisonhttps://www.alternet.org/culture/netflixs-hilarious-addictive-new-series-about-life-low-security-womens-prison
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">&quot;Orange Is the New Black&quot; is explicitly about the consequences of breaking bad, but never glorifies it.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> <p>“Orange Is the New Black,” Netflix’s hilarious, addictive, fantastic new series about the goings-on at a low-security women’s prison, is available in its entirety right now <a href="http://movies1.netflix.com/WiMovie/Orange_Is_the_New_Black/70242311?trkid=81027299">on the streaming service</a>, which presents a problem. I want to tell you how much you should go and watch it, but I am in a hurry to get back to watching it myself, because watching “Orange Is the New Black” is all I want to do. When I finish all 13 episodes, I suspect it will still be all I want to do. It’s that good.</p><p>“Orange Is the New Black”— which I will henceforth refer to as “Orange” because “OITNB” looks like the name of a boy band— stars Taylor Schilling as Piper Chapman, a Smith graduate who once transported a large quantity of drug money for her then-girlfriend, a sexy high-end heroin importer named Alex (“That 70s Show’s” Laura Prepon, who has never been close to this good in anything else). A decade later, Piper is ensconced in the full bougie Brooklyn, N.Y., lifestyle. She’s engaged to a writer named Larry (Jason Biggs) and starting an artisanal soap company with her best friend Polly — Barneys just agreed to carry the line — when she finally gets busted, pleads out, and is sentenced to 15 months at Litchfield women’s correctional institute, where Alex is also serving her time.</p><p>Piper does not, as her WASPy mother so indelicately and wrongheadedly puts it, “belong” in this sort of place: She’s white, affluent, college-educated. Piper immediately benefits from her difference — the prison caseworker sees in her someone he can “communicate” with — but also begins to unravel. She is the kind of woman who is used to having problems go away by telling the truth and saying sorry— doing what your mom told you to do on the playground — but that sort of touchy-feely stuff won’t work in a place where, as Piper’s commanding roommate later puts it, “they don’t believe the truth.”</p><p>But “Orange,” created by Jenji Kohan of “Weeds” and based on Piper Kerman’s memoir, is not just a story about how a privileged white girl learns to tough it out, or a story about how a privileged white girl really is just like everybody else. The show has way too much respect and affection for all of its other characters to be either so condescending or idiotically p.c. (In the biggest story line misstep, Piper is denied food in prison while the show flashes back to the time she went on a seven-day juice cleanse: It’s the series’ most on-the-nose moment.)</p><p>There are dozens of other inmates at Litchfield, of all races and ages, and each episode focuses on one in particular, filling out her back story and the series of predicaments and bad decisions that led to her sentence. There’s a fierce Russian cook, a very dry ex-junkie played by Natasha Lyonne, a highly dysfunctional mother-daughter duo, a chola obsessed with the Smiths, a transgendered former fireman, a crazy Jesus freak, a nun and many, many more. If “Orange” can be accused of anything, it’s of being almost universally sympathetic to this diverse, uproarious, fierce group of distinctive women: They may be in prison, but the only sociopath on this show is one of the guards (Pablo Schreiber, playing a creep named Pornstache).</p><p>Without ever being anything less than wildly entertaining, “Orange” is effortlessly in conversation with all of TV’s biggest themes, and, boy, does it have something new to say about every single one of them. Here is a show that is explicitly about the consequences of breaking bad, but that never glorifies it: Violating the law does not for one moment seem cool, just a bad choice that gets you locked up. By virtue of its almost entirely female cast, it’s an instant retort to the macho-man craze, proof positive that female dynamics are more than interesting enough to build a show around, whether they be romantic, maternal, familial or tribal. It stars a white girl, but in its racial diversity and frank acknowledgment of racial issues is a lesson to every show that does not address these subjects as a matter of course. There’s a scene where the camera hops around the cafeteria from the white table to the black table to the Hispanic table (prison is a lot like high school), with each group being more racist than the last. It’s probably the sharpest, funniest racial bit I’ve seen on TV since “The Chappelle Show.”</p><p>“Orange” is expansive, moving, crazy fun. It is so much these things that you may not even notice that it has hopped right out of some of quality TV’s most staid, boring cul-de-sacs, tossing over the fetishization of violence and the antihero and his hyper-heterosexuality for something new, complicated, really female, really gay and really delightful. It’s a great show — I’m going back to watching now.</p><p> </p> Sat, 13 Jul 2013 15:53:00 -0700Willa Paskin, Salon868503 at https://www.alternet.orgCultureCultureMedianetflixorange is the new black"Newsroom" Star Emily Mortimer: Americans Are Dangerously Uninformedhttps://www.alternet.org/story/155996/%22newsroom%22_star_emily_mortimer%3A_americans_are_dangerously_uninformed
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">&quot;The Newsroom&#039;s&quot; Emily Mortimer calls the Tea Party a &quot;lunatic fringe,&quot; and says Americans fall too easily for lies.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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On “The Newsroom,” Aaron Sorkin’s new series set behind the scenes of a crusading cable news show, Emily Mortimer plays Mackenzie MacHale, a seasoned, idealistic journalist hell-bent on bringing Americans a news program that will actually inform them. That means joining forces with an equally strong-willed news anchor (Jeff Daniels), who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend. Mortimer has appeared mostly in films, including “Lovely &amp; Amazing,” “Match Point” and “Hugo,” though one of her rare forays into TV resulted in her hilarious, unforgettable story line as the woman with Avian Bone Syndrome on “30 Rock.” As befits an Aaron Sorkin heroine, Mortimer is a wonderful talker, all energetic, run-on sentences and emphatic curse words. She spoke with us about her politics, the show’s romantic-comedy appeal, and impersonating Groucho Marx.</p>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">Were you a fan of Aaron Sorkin already? Had you watched his shows?</strong></p>
<p>
I had watched bits of “The West Wing” and of course I thought it was fantastic. And I’d seen “The Social Network” and “Moneyball,” and I thought “Moneyball” was just phenomenal, one of the best movies of the year. It’s such a truism to talk about Aaron’s “way with words,” but I was a huge fan. But I felt like “Newsroom” was something a little bit different from other things I’d seen of his, in that there was this romantic element to it between my character and Jeff [Daniels]‘s character, which gets more and more as the series goes on. And that was something that I was very drawn to. As a child I watched Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movies without really knowing what they were, but loving them, and I also love this show called “Moonlighting,” which you may not have heard of …</p>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">I can’t even tell you how much I love “Moonlighting” and how much I talk about it and how much it, like, explains everything that is appealing about Bruce Willis.</strong></p>
<p>
I was so in love with him! I was obsessed with him, and her. And I used to not know how I was going to get through the week once it was over. I think I was about 12 or 13 when it was on in England and I was just like, “I don’t know if I can survive the week without it.” There are very few romantic comedies these days that work. And I feel Sorkin understands what George Cukor and Billy Wilder and all those people who did it so brilliantly in those days did, which is that the best way of depicting sexual tension is the way people talk to each other, the words they use to talk to each other. And if you set something in a world where people talk and it’s fast and funny anyway, like in the world of the news or politics, then you have a recipe for an incredible kind of banter. And so that was what I really responded to, that made me feel like, oh my God, I can be in something like “Moonlighting.” [Laughing] Don’t ever tell [Sorkin] I compared him to “Moonlighting.”</p>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">“Moonlighting” is a wonderful and seminal show. I don’t think he’d be embarrassed. One of the sort of screwball elements in the second episode is when your character mistakenly sends an email to the whole staff. It’s almost farcical. I’m not sure if she would’ve made that kind of error …</strong></p>
<p>
Well, that’s what I think Aaron is attracted to: Characters who are extremely smart and brilliant at what they do and then kind of go crazy, in like intense, insane ways. When these sorts of people fuck up, they fuck up large. And I also think that there’s a theme through the series about the separation between young people, who understand technology and the age of the Internet, and the older generation that just haven’t got a handle on it and can’t quite be bothered to get a handle on it.</p>
<p>
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">You don’t really look old enough to be the stand-in for the older generation and total technological ineptitude.</strong></p>
<p>
I’m so psyched that you said that. I’ll take that. But I am old enough to be a Luddite as far as that kind of technology is concerned because I am in real life.</p>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">Were the politics of the show appealing to you as well?</strong></p>
<p>
I was very interested in the politics. I am kind of a political person. There was a time when I was in school when I thought maybe that’s what I was going to do. I got all into the idea of politics and anarchists and Kropotkin, this Russian guy who founded the anarchist party. I got completely besotted by the idea of anarchy as the way that we should all live our lives and I was ready to kind of go fight for my belief, but then I got to university and did lots of plays and kind of forgot about that.</p>
<p>
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">Are you as troubled by America’s news culture as Sorkin seems to be?</strong></p>
<p>
I can remember when Bush got in for the second time, just feeling like so much of the problem about the way that politics go here is that people are improperly informed. That they didn’t know that they had been lied to, or they didn’t understand exactly to what extent they had been, and they still thought that there were weapons of mass destruction. And that was just crazy to me that people could be so under-informed. I do think that there’s a difference in America to where I’m from. There’s so much wrong with England, but I think people are informed in general. I’m going to make a huge sweeping statement, but you just get the news much more [in England]. Listening to radio stations that play pop music all day and all night, the news will come on every two hours, foreign news too. It’s part of your daily routine, being informed about what’s going on in the world. Whether you like it or not, you can’t really escape it. I don’t think the same is true here, and television broadcast news especially seems to me to be a pretty dicey area. You can’t rely on getting the facts, or getting them presented in a way that is actually objective and makes sense and puts people in a position where they can make informed decisions about who to vote for. It’s just over-sensationalized and, as our show keeps pointing out, one of the big problems is that they act like there’s just two definite sides to every discussion — and that’s just not necessarily the case, but it feeds into the way this country has just become completely polarized. This Tea Party is presented on the television as the viable alternative instead of like a lunatic fringe.</p>
<p>
I do think there’s a danger with mixing politics and entertainment, and I think Aaron is really aware of that and feels like the show’s going to work based on whether the relationships work. But what I love about him is that he is brave about going there, and if people are going to be watching his show, why not use it to make them think about something that is important to think about? And I think that’s really cool. We went on Charlie Rose the other week and I was thinking, “Oh my God, I better have something interesting to say,” so I read this book about Walter Cronkite, like I was literally writing up passages from the book, and then Charlie Rose didn’t ask me anything about politics. He only asked like, “What’s it like to be an actor?” and [laughing] I didn’t have anything to say. But anyway, one of the quotes I took down was from Edmund Burke: “Evil happens when good men do nothing.” When people stop trying to change things and stop trying to make things better, then bad shit happens. And I think Aaron, for all his wonderful craziness, is a good person trying to do something, and that’s amazing.</p>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">You’ve lived in America for more than a decade, but you’re British. Have you always been engaged with American politics?</strong></p>
<p>
Our world is so affected by who’s in charge here that it feels like it’s massively important. The first 10 years of my being here there was a guy in charge who was just so terrifying and it made me feel so unsettled the whole time that this guy was making those decisions. And it’s such a nice feeling having this guy in charge now. But I feel like he’s standing on a sort of postage stamp in a sea full of sharks. Please just cling on to that postage stamp!</p>
<p>
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">So you are a person who follows the news, who is up on the news?</strong></p>
<p>
I have moments. I stopped being up on the news entirely when I was doing this job. I didn’t read a paper or watch the television news for many months. And now it’s been quite hard to get back into it. It’s so loaded now because of this job that I’m doing. Even picking up the New York Times feels kind of loaded with meaning; I feel berated every time I look at it, like”‘Oh God, all these people know what they’re doing and I was just pretending.”</p>
<p>
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">You’ve been on TV shows before, but you haven’t starred in a show. Were you at all hesitant to get involved in a long-term project like this?</strong></p>
<p>
I wasn’t, but I don’t think I was really thinking straight. It wasn’t until afterward that I realized quite what I got myself into there. I was just seduced by the script of the pilot, the part and the writing, and that’s always how I’ve kind of gone about choosing things. I was just like, “It’s so great, I’ve got to, I want to be in it.” One of my really great friends is Kelly Macdonald who does “Boardwalk Empire,” and after I got the job I had lunch with her, she was like [laughing], “You know it’s really quite horrible. It’s fucking hard work, and it’s amazing and wonderful and all that stuff.” So I got the whiff from talking to her of what I got myself into, but I hadn’t really prepared myself at all. And probably it was more like hard work than anything I’ve had to do before.</p>
<p>
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">How so?</strong></p>
<p>
It’s just so intense. The scripts were like 80 to 90 pages. One is like a screenplay of an indie movie, and then you’re shooting it in nine days and it’s just crazy. Towards the end of it, the fourth and a half month in, I took like a 10-minute nap in my trailer, and when I woke up, I realized it was the first time I’d seen my trailer from that point of view. I hadn’t even sat down in my trailer before because I’d been just pacing from one side to the other to learn my lines.</p>
<p>
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">Did you enjoy playing one character for so long? </strong></p>
<p>
The thing about the movies is that you never want to repeat yourself. It’s anathema in a movie to repeat a moment or a scene. Everything has to be different from everything else. It’s sort of built into your process — that’s such a pretentious word, but one of the things that one instinctively knows not to do on a movie is to repeat yourself. As I was doing the part, I realized part of the pleasure of television, what people want is to see the characters in similar circumstances every week. And you get a little bit freaked out, like, “I feel like I’ve done this before, I’ve said this before. I’ve said something very similar to this in a very similar way.” It’s kind of disconcerting. But it’s telling a story over a long period of time, in incremental steps, and it does slowly change. It’s more like life — it’s like nothing changes and then suddenly everything changes.</p>
<p>
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">Do you have a favorite line or scene?</strong></p>
<p>
There’s a moment in the sixth episode where I do this really bad Groucho Marx impersonation, and I have really fond memories of that. Just because Aaron wrote a scene where I had to do a bad Groucho Marx impersonation and it was so bizarre. I had the walk and the cigar but I was too scared to do the walk and the cigar, but Jeff made me do both. It will probably be really appalling to watch and embarrassing, and if you think that email scene was a farce … But it was really liberating and weird. By the end of it I was completely attached to this weird thing and the director kept trying to get me to tone it down, he kept being like, “Can you not do the eyebrows as well, can you not do the eyebrows and the walk?” And I was like, “I’m fucking doing it all! You can’t make me not do the eyebrows now, come on!”</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. </div></div></div>Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:00:01 -0700Willa Paskin, Salon671354 at https://www.alternet.orgCultureCulturetea partynewsroomemily mortimer"Mad Men's" Genius Fifth Seasonhttps://www.alternet.org/story/155851/%22mad_men%27s%22_genius_fifth_season
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The finale couldn&#039;t top Fat Betty, a shocking death or &quot;Zou Bisou.&quot; But after a riveting run, bring on year six.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<p>
“Zou Bisou Bisou,” fat Betty, murderous fever dreams, Roger Sterling’s adventures in LSD, Pete Campbell’s sexual liaisons with a former “Gilmore Girl,” scenes from a Howard Johnson’s, Hare Krishnas, Joan’s acceptance of an indecent proposal, and Lane Pryce’s suicide: It has been one gonzo season of “Mad Men.”</p>
<p>
Almost every episode has contained one of the crazy, audacious, John-Deere-tractor-taking-off-a-guy’s-foot-in-the-office, Roger-Sterling-does-blackface moments that past seasons doled out sparingly. Next to all these intensities, last night’s finale could not compare. It felt downright stately (except for the moment when Peggy first appeared on-screen in her power-red Chanel suit, commanding two dudes around like a Don Draper-style boss: I clapped. Oh, and then there were the rutting dogs outside Peggy’s window, my new favorite nonsense “Mad Men” metaphor, replacing the overdetermined old person from last season who meaningfully held fruit in Don Draper’s hall), a sort of dull coda to the craziness that came before, an epilogue and a callback to the calmer episodes of seasons past, a return to normal, thematically interesting if not dramatically riveting.</p>
<p>
At the beginning of the fifth season, Roger Sterling asked, “When will everything get back to normal?” One way to think of this season is as a helix. The characters are not exactly back where they started, but somewhere in the vicinity, further up, older and higher, but with the same view. (Next season Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce — maybe soon to be Sterling Cooper Draper Campbell? — will get a second floor, connected by staircase, and Pete will have the same view as Don Draper). Pete’s hairline, which was mentioned way back in the season’s first episode, has been receding dramatically; the costume department is dressing Joan in less flattering clothes, and she needs glasses; Lane’s dead. And, yet, these characters remain their immutable selves, mucking around in the same themes and patterns. Roger’s still trying to get women to take care of him, even if he is also partaking in LSD while naked; Harry Crane is still insufferable; Joan feels compelled to play the Lane part at every meeting; Pete has become king of the office but he’s still getting punched in the face, trying out the self-serving gestures Don was kicking around in Season 1 (“Let’s go to L.A. It’s filled with sunshine,” he tells Beth, hoping she’ll run away with him, just like Don hoped Rachel Mencken would) and coming to the conclusion that all of his behavior — in a speech that just about any character on the show could have given — is a “temporary bandage on a permanent wound.” But most of all, Don Draper is still Don Draper. The song playing at the end of this episode, continuing the year-long tradition of extremely on-the-nose fade-out songs, was Nancy Sinatra singing “You Only Live Twice.” (Maybe <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/yolo-the-newest-abbreviation-youll-love-to-hate/2012/04/06/gIQA3QE2zS_blog.html">Zac Efron can get his tattoo amended to YOLT?</a>)</p>
<p>
The episode ended with a fetching young woman approaching Don, who has just left Megan on the sound stage of her very first commercial, and asking, “Are you alone?” We don’t see him answer, but I don’t have many doubts. Don thought Megan could change him, could make him feel better, could, in the words of Pete’s speech to Beth, make getting older mean something. For much of this season, she did. But she’s just a temporary bandage on a permanent wound. Life still hurts, teeth still ache, the people Don cares about are still hanging themselves, he’s still dissatisfied. (Here’s Matt Weiner on Don’s speech to Dow Chemical last week: “<a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/mad-men-creator-matthew-weiner-reflects-on-the-season-so-far/?ref=arts">It was supposed to be ugly</a>. It was supposed to be a voracious representation of dissatisfaction – what does this man have to complain about? That greed for the sensation of victory is ugly, and that’s kind of who he is.”) And he still has a wife who needs taking care of.</p>
<p>
Just a few weeks ago, when Megan quit the agency to be an actress, Peggy announced her faith that Megan was one of those people who could just “do everything.” At the time, it felt like Peggy was right. Don’s young, brave, ambitious wife was the kind of person to whom things came effortlessly, and if she wanted to be an actress, she would be an actress. Every since she “Zou Bisou”-ed at the beginning of this season, I’ve hoped the long arc of her and Don’s relationship would be that Draper was finally going to get out-Drapered. At some point, Megan would cheat on him or leave him, the way he has cheated on and left everyone else. The player would get played.</p>
<p>
But in the finale, Megan’s future does not seem so undeniable. Peggy might be wrong. Megan continues to have a hard time finding work. Her friend tells her about a commercial one of Don’s clients is shooting, and Megan betrays that friend to ask Don to get her an audition instead. He’s reluctant and dickish about it, put off by her auditioning in front of people he knows, if also, in his way correct: She should want to make it as herself, not as his wife. Megan goes to the bathroom and cries, and then pouts and gets very drunk. (I wish Megan’s behavior seemed more intrinsic to her character. The woman who hate-ate all that sherbet wouldn’t behave like this kind of a sad sack. But Megan is still a foil for Don and not quite a person.)</p>
<p>
Marie Calvet, Megan’s mother and Roger Sterling’s hookup, suddenly seems to be seeing her daughter far more clearly than Peggy. Marie is enormously skeptical about Megan’s future as an actress. After calling her daughter an ungrateful little bitch, she tells Don that Megan’s tantrum is what happens when one has “an artistic temperament but is not an artist.” (Between this week and Betty Draper’s performance last week, it’s been a good run for bad mothers.)</p>
<p>
Marie’s incisive quipping doesn’t end there. She goes to Roger Sterling’s hotel for a quickie and Roger emotionally asks her if she’ll please do LSD with him because he doesn’t want to do it alone: “Please don’t ask me to take care of you,” she says, in what basically amounts to some version of both Don and Pete’s fantasy, a relationship in which they provide all the money, and their wife provides all the emotional support. (Pete and Trudy’s relationship fell apart when she was distracted by their child; Trudy probably staved off divorce when she embraced a banged-up Pete and comforted him by assuring him he did, in fact, need his own apartment in New York.)</p>
<p>
When Marie gets back to Don and Megan’s apartment, Don yells at her for letting Megan get so drunk. “She’s your responsibility now,” Marie replies, and the cheating’s in the bedsheets. Don ends up helping Megan get the commercial. He watches her screen test in a smoky room, and smiles, but there’s something nostalgic about it, just as there was when he pitched the Carousel in a similarly lit room back in Season 1 — like he’s remembering when he saw Megan for the first time, when she was the young woman who was going to help him, to love him, to teach him about Beatles records, and make him the envy of every party, and not someone who needed his help too. And so, yes, Don Draper’s alone. Again. What a jerk, but what a season.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. </div></div></div>Tue, 12 Jun 2012 21:00:01 -0700Willa Paskin, Salon671184 at https://www.alternet.orgCultureCulturemad men"Push Girls:" A Look at the New Reality TV Show About Four Attractive, Wheelchair-bound Womenhttps://www.alternet.org/story/155749/%22push_girls%3A%22_a_look_at_the_new_reality_tv_show_about_four_attractive%2C_wheelchair-bound_women
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">They may be in wheelchairs, but they do not get special treatment. Just like everyone else on reality TV, they will be allowed, on occasion, to make fools of themselves.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/images/managed/storyimages_1338929867_singleton1.jpeg?itok=PUMQMnc0" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>I don’t know if you’ve looked at a copy of the Declaration of Independence lately, but if you have, you would have seen the following footnote affixed to the end of this sentence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.*</p>
<p><em>* ”and the right to say the word “connection” with a straight face should they ever appear on a reality television program.”</em></p></blockquote>
<div data-toggle-group="story-12932166"><p>Sundance Channel’s “Push Girls,” a simultaneously singular and standard reality TV show about four attractive, wheelchair-bound women, chronicles its subjects as they pursue all of the inalienable rights outlined in this updated Declaration, including life, liberty and a brunch-time discussion with one’s girlfriends about the “spiritual connection” one has with a “family-oriented” dude who refuses to stop sleeping around.</p>
<p>This brunch scene comes about 10 minutes into the pilot, after we have met the four women, three of whom were paralyzed in car accidents, and one of whom had a spinal aneurysm when she was 15 years old. The outgoing and bisexual Tiphany, who has already told us how much she likes flirting and sex, tears up as she explains to the three other women, whom she has known for years, that a man named Matt, a guy with an untrimmed soul patch and an interest in seeing other women, would nonetheless like to continue to, “in his words, make love” to her.</p>
<p>Some variation on this scene — the bad guy, the moribund language, the tears — exists in most reality TV shows, and though I rolled my eyes to see it here, just as I do whenever it appears, I was also perversely impressed. This sort of anodyne, vaguely staged girl talk, more than any other of the far more interesting scenes in this first episode, shows just how much “Push Girls” does not want to condescend to its subjects: They may be in wheelchairs, but they do not get special treatment. Just like everyone else on reality TV, they will be allowed, on occasion, to make fools of themselves.</p>
<p>This sort of interplay between standard reality TV tropes and the four women’s singular circumstances animates the show. One of the women, Angela, who was a model and needs full-time assistance, decides to begin modeling again, a standard reality TV gambit. But when she calls around to see if she can book any gigs, none of the agencies are wheelchair accessible. When she arranges to have a new set of head shots taken, her leg won’t stop spasming, and she has to explain to the photographer that the whole point of these photos is to keep the wheelchair in them. At the gym, Mia and Tiphany talk about dating. Mia has a boyfriend but misses going on dates, and there’s some straightforward sex talk between the two — all taking place while they nonchalantly navigate a weight room in their chairs.</p>
<p>As the photo shoot sequence most clearly demonstrates, the women are straightforward about their physical circumstances, often far more so than the people around them. To varying degrees, they are all extroverts (they’re on a reality TV show, after all), and this provides for a few blunt exchanges having nothing to do with wheelchairs that you would still rarely see on another series. When Tiphany explains the Matt situation in her supporting interview, she puts it very succinctly: “It ended with Matt because he wanted to fuck other girls. And I wasn’t down for that.” If only “The Bachelor” contained even one such declarative sentences.</p>
<p>It is disappointing that “Push Girls” is not a more high-minded documentary series. As an audience, we have dozens and dozens of places where we can listen to inane brunch chatter or watch a bisexual woman assert that she doesn’t like “labels.” But this version of the show that contains these cliches may ultimately be the more stereotype upending. The four women on “Push Girls” want to change what people think of women in wheelchairs, to demonstrate that, as Tiphany says, people in wheelchairs do not need “to sit home in dirty sweats with food on their shirts playing video games all day long,” but they also want to clink cocktails, talk about dudes, and get public recognition for behaving in certain codified trashy ways. “Push Girls” is not as edifying as it might be, but it’s not sanctimonious either. These women may be in wheelchairs, but they too want their 15 minutes. Why shouldn’t they have it?</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. </div></div></div>Tue, 05 Jun 2012 10:00:01 -0700Willa Paskin, Salon671109 at https://www.alternet.orgCultureCulturetvpush girls"It's Not You. It's Jesus." How TV Reflects Our Odd Attitude Towards Chastityhttps://www.alternet.org/story/155272/%22it%27s_not_you._it%27s_jesus.%22_how_tv_reflects_our_odd_attitude_towards_chastity
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">There are three fictional adults grappling with their virginities with varying amounts of shame in big-name TV shows.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/images/managed/storyimages_1336083126_screenshot20120503at6.10.51pm.png?itok=Msgv_8UX" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Ever since “90210’s” Donna Martin held on to hers for seven seasons, adult virginity — the state of having it and the act of losing it — has been a recurring plot point on TV dramas, and not just ones set in high school. The rules that apply to virginity in characters of a certain age are more or less the same ones that apply to Chekhov’s famous gun: If it appears in the first season, it will probably go off by the third, or the fourth, or the seventh, just as it did for Donna Martin. There are currently three fictional adults — or two adults and a self-identified “Girl” — grappling with their virginities with varying amounts of shame in big-name TV shows. (Shame-free virginity: not currently a fictional TV offering.)</p>
<p>“Grey’s Anatomy’s” April Kepner (Sarah Drew) just lost her virginity last week, and will be dealing with the fallout in this one, on tonight’s episode. April’s deflowering would have been a happy event — if the show hadn’t used the mind-bending powers of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroactive_continuity">retroactive continuity</a> to suddenly assert that she had been saving herself because of her religious beliefs. At the beginning of last season, the high-strung, cheery Kepner (a common characteristic of TV virgins is a type-A, neurotic personality) yelled at her colleagues, in an effort to quell their merciless teasing, “I am a 28-year-old virgin, namely because I wanted my first time to be special and then I waited too long, and partially because I’m pretty sure guys find me annoying.” She then spent the next year and a half flirting, making out with and never quite sleeping with a series of guys who weren’t right for her, without once mentioning chastity or a higher power.</p>
<p>Then last Thursday, she threw herself on fellow resident Jackson, assuring him — after he kept repeating to her, out loud, “You’re a virgin” — that having sex with him was really what she wanted to do. The next day, she seemed shell-shocked. When Jackson tried to apologize, she explained, “It’s not you. It’s Jesus. I was a virgin because I loved Jesus. And now Jesus hates me.” Ta-dah! April Kepner had been magically transformed from an accidental, circumstantial virgin into a religious one. In the process she’s gotten stuck in a fun house mirror of TV sex-shaming: Having felt ashamed for two seasons about not having had sex, she now gets to feel ashamed for a few more seasons about having had it.</p>
<p>At least “Girls’” Shoshanna Shapiro (the hilarious Zosia Mamet, who I sold <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/12/girls_lives_up_to_the_hype/">short in my original review of “Girls”</a>; having seen the full season, I retract my assertion that she’s the cast’s “weak link”) only has to share the first half of April’s plight. A devotee of “Sex and the City” and books with titles like “Listen Ladies,” the abashed Shoshanna thinks of her virginity as an embarrassment, and her friends, though sweet about it, basically agree. When Shoshanna tells Marnie (Allison Williams) that “I am almost 22 and I am a virgin. Everyone and their mother has had sex except for me,” Marnie doesn’t quite know what to say. She tries to comfort Shoshanna by asking if she’s ever given a blow job, which is “basically the same thing.” Shoshanna hasn’t. Marnie, at a loss, then shares a story about how she hit a puppy with her car. Puppy killer and virgin, semi-equivalent mortifications.</p>
<p>Despite interactions like these, the implacable Shoshanna doesn’t consider lying about her sexual status. On this Sunday’s episode she hits it off with a guy, brings him home, gets in bed with him, and in a perfectly typical “Girls” sex scene — a woman contorting herself in all sorts of emotional and physical positions to have sex she probably won’t even enjoy — tells him she’s never had sex before. “That’s not really my thing, virgins,” the guy replies, not that nicely. “OK, except for the fact that I haven’t had sex, I’m totally not a virgin,” Shoshanna fast-talks. “I’m like the least virgin-y virgin ever.” The guy doesn’t buy it, and though he is presented as a jerk, the message is clear: Her virginity is just as awkward as Shoshanna thinks it is.</p>
<p>Whether losing it or keeping it, virginity is a big deal for both Shoshanna and April, one of the major ways that they define themselves. Not so for Sherlock Holmes, who returns to TV on PBS this Sunday in the second season of the BBC’s modern-day take on the famous detective. Taking his cues from the original Sherlock (and not the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_%282010_film%29">action hero incarnation</a>), this Sherlock (the wondrously named Benedict Cumberbatch) has little to no interest in women, unless they are part of a case. But in the first episode of this new season, based on “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scandal_in_Bohemia">A Scandal in Bohemia</a>,” Irene Adler, the only woman who ever turned Sherlock’s head, appears and the subject of Sherlock’s virginity comes to the fore. Sherlock, it seems, is a virgin. Adler reveals that Holmes’ arch-nemesis, Moriarty, calls him just that (as opposed to on “Girls” and “Grey’s,” only Holmes’ enemies laugh at him), and when Adler asks Sherlock if he’s ever had sex, Holmes, for maybe the first and only time, looks uncomfortable. Prior to Irene’s appearance, this question wouldn’t have mattered to him at all. Sherlock, as a rule, doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, let alone thinks of him, but in the presence of a woman he’s actually interested in, even the great Holmes becomes a smidge embarrassed.</p>
<p>But this flash of insecurity and emotion is only temporary. Sherlock is a singular character for many reasons, and to a list that includes genius and legend, you can probably add forever-virgin. Unlike Shoshanna, April or any of the virginal characters that have come before, it seems unlikely Sherlock will ever actually do the deed. This, in its way, is the most interesting take on the virgin arc that’s yet been on TV: Rather than go through the typical, protracted “will he do it and when he does it will he feel good or bad about it?” story line, Sherlock’s sex life will remain sublimated, just one of the many interesting, unique things about him. It makes a certain amount of sense. After all, if anyone can keep that gun from going off in the third act, it would be Sherlock Holmes.</p>
<p>Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. </div></div></div>Thu, 03 May 2012 12:00:01 -0700Willa Paskin, Salon670620 at https://www.alternet.orgSex & RelationshipsSex & RelationshipsCulturesextvvirginityvirgins"Shameless": TV's Dysfunctional Sweethearts May Be One of the Most Underappreciated Showshttps://www.alternet.org/story/154814/%22shameless%22%3A_tv%27s_dysfunctional_sweethearts_may_be_one_of_the_most_underappreciated_shows
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">&quot;Shameless&quot; may be the most purely entertaining series that is fundamentally a tragedy.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/images/managed/storyimages_1333405554_shameless460x307.jpeg?itok=FT1tJ5WV" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Showtime’s shaggy family drama “Shameless” finished its second season last night, and just like the semi-abandoned siblings the show focuses on, it deserves more love than it receives. The series, based on a British one of the same name, follows the Gallagher clan, six kids approximately ages 2 to 22 who are left to raise themselves while their alcoholic, malignant father, Frank (William H. Macy), does as much as he can not to help them. “Shameless” is maybe the most purely entertaining series that is fundamentally a tragedy I’ve ever seen: Try as they might — and they try so, so hard — the Gallagher kids have been saddled with too much. Their lives are dozens of Jerry Springer episodes strung together (“My father had sex with my underage girlfriend!” “I think my uncle is my dad!” “My mother attempted suicide in front of me!” “I’m an African-American whose two biological parents are white!” “My boyfriend has a secret identity!”), and while their day-to-day experiences have the sort of intense circus energy that suggests, they also have the hollowed-out darkness that comes from being stuck in a life most people cackle over and then have the luxury to flick off.</p>
<div id="story-12781591"><div id="fold-12781591" status="visible"><p>The most Jerry Springer-ready character on “Shameless” is Frank. As played by Macy, Frank is a very fully realized pathological manic dirtbag. There is no drug or drink he won’t consume, no scam he won’t pursue, no subject he won’t pontificate on, no ethical boundary he won’t cross. Frank takes up all the air in the room. He brags and boasts and schemes, before collapsing into a pool of his own vomit. If he loves his children it’s a very notional kind of love: He’d steal from them and sell them — he has, in fact, stolen from them and sold them — before he’d hug them, and say it’s all part of a strategy of making them self-reliant. And despite being a drain on his family, the state and the world’s supply of alcohol, Frank imagines himself, perpetually, as the victim, of his mother, of his children, of the responsibilities he always ignores. Worst of all, it’s not that Frank isn’t capable of a certain sweetness; it’s just that this sweetness is exclusively directed at his ex-wife, Monica, the only person more self-involved than him. He is exhausting.</p>
<p>Frank is insufferable in the sort of showy, grandiose way that would be riveting to watch if his children weren’t so much more grounded and sympathetic. As is perhaps realistic of growing up with a father like Frank, the Gallagher siblings are not a performative bunch. They are not prone to speeches, complaining or whining, and when they get in fistfights, they do so quietly. Compared to his kids, Frank is a cartoonish, next-level dirtbag. Next-level dirtbags and antiheroes may be currently en vogue on TV, but the appeal of “Shameless” is all the straight-up good guys — nuanced and complicated and mistake making, sure — who clean up after him. Despite Macy’s billing and screen time, Frank is ultimately the supporting jerk, not the main character of this show.</p>
<p>The real protagonist of “Shameless” is Fiona Gallagher (Emmy Rossum), a TV heroine of such sheer likability she is, to my mind, the heir to “Friday Night Lights’” Tami Taylor. Fiona, the eldest, hugely self-sacrificing sister, has the misfortune to have the innate sense of responsibility both of her parents lack. Bright and tough, potty-mouthed and occasionally promiscuous, responsible beyond measure, she dropped out of high school to raise her siblings. Week in and week out, she does what she can to make sure they have more stability than she did. Early this season, when Fiona found out that her genius brother Lip (Jeremy Allen White: Imagine if Dustin Hoffman in his seedy roles were extremely sexy) had possibly gotten a girl pregnant, she initially refused to get mad. “I’m not your mother,” she said, waited a few seconds, and then smacked him upside the head for being such an idiot. Fiona isn’t his mother, but in the Gallagher world, what does being a mother count for anyway? Being Fiona counts for a whole lot more.</p>
<p>What makes Fiona such a heartbreakingly sympathetic character, and not just a saintly one, is the ways in which she is constantly struggling and bridling against her own selflessness. Taking care of her siblings is how Fiona defines herself. She takes pride in how much they need her. And yet, at 22, she hasn’t entirely given up on her own life. When her bipolar mother, Monica, even more negligent than Frank, showed up late this season in seemingly decent mental health, Fiona’s skepticism about letting her care for the kids didn’t last long. Fiona wanted to finish school, get a better job and take time to herself. She relented and let Monica in, only to have it all explode in her face when Monica and Frank spent the thousands of dollars the kids had been saving up for the winter, and then Monica, having slipped into a depression, slit her wrist on the kitchen floor during Thanksgiving dinner. Fiona does imagine that everyone needs her, but she doesn’t justimagine it: They really do need her, and she’s trapped by that need. In last night’s finale, the family returned from the hospital after Monica’s suicide attempt to find blood still all over the kitchen floor. Fiona started to sob while cleaning it up. Thinking about her little brothers and sister, she cried, “These poor kids,” to her boyfriend Jimmy (he used to go by Steve, but see the “My boyfriend has a secret identity!” episode mentioned earlier for clarity on the name change). But all I was thinking was, “Poor Fiona,” the one left to get the blood off the floor — and who later that night would let her two younger siblings, the too sweet and open Debbie and the soon-to-be psychopath Carl, climb into her bed and cry it out. Those poor kids have her. Who does she have?</p>
<p>Last night’s episode almost ended on the perfect note: The family throwing Frank out into the snow where he belongs and Lip — who left home in a snit a few episodes — finally coming back. Instead, there were two unnecessary scenes that followed Lip’s homecoming, one of Fiona and Jimmy finally having sex (he came back mid-season married: It’s taken them some time to work it out), and Lip starting something with Jimmy’s very beautiful Brazilian bride. That’s “Shameless” and the Gallaghers: A little sloppy, lascivious and unbalanced, never able to quit when they’re ahead, and endlessly imperfect. But in between all that, so much goodness.</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. </div></div></div>Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:00:01 -0700Willa Paskin, Salon670168 at https://www.alternet.orgCultureCulturetvshameless